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Morse Coders Beat SMSers
dgnicholson writes "Jay Leno did a text off between two text messengers and two Morse coders. The Morse coders handily beat the young whippersnappers with time to spare. It might be a fun phone app to make a Morse code messenger, if you kept your headset in and had an external sender, could be interesting. Perhaps a Morse code Skype device."
Granted, but let's see them repeat the experiment with a device that has a full keyboard on it.
Or what about get the guy holding the SMS device (phone) to type in a specially crafted 10 digit number allowing a two way audio connection between two devices.
Every person on the planet has a wife, sister or mother than can talk faster than 250+ WPM.
OMFG, Slashdot's "Lameness filter" just prevented me from posting a comment on this story in morse code. I cry censorship, someone call the ACLU!
Try it, if you don't believe me.
This is called "making it up as you go along"
"Predictive text input is much faster."
Actually predictive text input is no faster. See? I can make stuff up too!
"Also, the US is not the big SMS country."
Uh...which matters because...uh... our champion SMS users are not as good as "their" champion SMS users? What? Huh?
"It hardly has GSM!"
Yes, because SMS over CDMA is so much slower. Because it doesn't use the dixie-helmann-thingy compression that ...uh... the morse code thingy uses.
"More people still use outdated devices like pagers."
Yes, which really hurts SMS texting rates!
"Thirdly they also tested the transport medium."
And this is important because our networks are slower than the Japanese networks because uh... the dixie-helman-mayonnaise compression that is umbiqitious...uh...pagers used... ummm... and why, we hardly have GSM!
"and can be re-read if something was missed"
Yes, because I might've missed something in that SMS message that said "CU L8R, LOL!!!!!"
"This is not fair, as for very long distance morse messages one can have intermediaries as well which would lengthen the process considerably."
Well, it might have been fairer but they didn't use the Dixie-Helman...thingy that morse code has for uh...non-English languages.
"thus also making asynchronous conversation slower"
Oh hell, just call the other person on the phone, and if they're not there, leave a message. My way is fastest of all.
"I've recently been to Japan and had the rare privelege seeing a teenage school-girl on a Train sitting and texting on two phones at the same time! Beat that!"
I was recently watching my daughter use AIM talking to 5 people at a time on AIM.
I win.
Oh. She was using that Dixie-Hellman-Mayonaisse thingy you keep whining about.
Why I prefer SMS over Morse code:
I don't have to remember any encoding rules.
Why I prefer phone calls over SMS:
I don't have to remember how to spell.
Why I prefer silence over phone calls:
I don't have to remember to be polite or feign interest.
To be fair, the compression algorithm for this transmission method only allow for two messages: or
Off, course, considering they are teens, they pretty much only use the cell phones for variations of message #2, so your point is still valid : )
You can't take the sky from me...